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SUMMARY:Cleft sentences in the history of French and English: a case of pr
 agmatic borrowing? - Prof. Carola Trips (Mannheim) & Prof. Achim Stein (St
 uttgart) 
DTSTART:20131031T154500Z
DTEND:20131031T164500Z
UID:TALK47678@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Ioanna Sitaridou
DESCRIPTION:This talk will address the question of whether there is a conn
 ection between the development of clefts in older stages of French and Eng
 lish (“contact hypothesis”). Based on corpus studies of Old French and
  Middle English we will provide new data for a careful evaluation of the c
 ontact hypothesis\, and some clues for the informationstructural differenc
 es between languages which share many other syntactic properties\nand deve
 lopments. Further\, we will compare the plausibility of internal developme
 nt to contact-induced\nchange\, which relates the development of English c
 left structures to the French influence after the Norman conquest (Wehr\, 
 2005\; Filppula\, 2009). Based on our findings we will assume that pragmat
 ic borrowing in the sense of Prince (1988) has occurred. Our proposal is b
 ased on data extracted from the most relevant diachronic corpora for Old a
 nd Middle French (MCVF: Martineau 2009\; SRCMF: Prévost and Stein 2013)\,
 \nand Old and Middle English (YCOE: Taylor et al. 2003\; PPCME2: Kroch and
  Taylor 2000).
LOCATION:Bowett Room\, Queens’ College\, Cambridge
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